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In this and the next number, scholars
from several disciplines answer the question, "What turning
points signal the Early Modern?" Though apparently innocuous,
the question is at least provocative, and (I hope) subversive:
it invites, even requires, answers free of a prioris. Indeed,
it deliberately encourages primary attention to specifics and
multiplicity of frameworks?in short, a challenge to rethink periodization
as inductively and pluralistically as possible.
If the reader senses an anti-Foucaldian
tilt in this description, so be it, but that tilt is no doubt
mine alone and does not implicate any of the distinguished scholars
who graciously contributed these essays. Nonetheless, I hope all
will agree that working dogmatically de haut en bas has taken
us as far as it can, and that it is now time to reverse procedure
and work up hypothetically from concrete particulars. The essays
in this volume provide models and preliminary results.
Francis Noël Thomas's "Une
Moult Grande Signifiance" examines Providence and Fortune,
whose domains respectively diminish and increase in Early Modern
history and literature. His texts are Froissart's account of Charles
VI's descent into madness and Mme de Lafayette's narrative of
Henri II's death, the former ambiguous about causation, the latter
asserting simple accident.
In "The Age of Philosophy,"
George Huppert explores the ideological implications of classical
education in the sixteenth century by focusing on several heated
debates which began in the 1540s and continued into the 1620s
featuring the Parisian intellectual Pierre de La Ramée.
For Huppert, a principal sign of the Early Modern is the emergence
of the intellectual as dissident and of intellectual institutions
as privileged spaces for propagating non-conformist thought.
George Hugo Tucker's "Homo
Viator and the Liberty of Exile," considers the Renaissance
interplay of writing and reading, world and literary work, at
a variety of crisscrossing levels: factual, literary, and metaphorical.
The case of Joannes Sambucus (János Zsámboky, 1531-84)
furnishes an Early Modern paradigm of text creating positive identity
out of the negative thematics of travel.
The professionalization of editing
is the theme of Elias Rivers's "Garcilaso, Góngora,
and Their Readers." Neither poet prepared his work for print
publication: both were edited for university graduates by intellectual
peers whose annotations not only provided philological information
and commentary, but, in one case at least, a heavy dose of literary
theory.
For Zachary Sayre Schiffman, the
individualizing view, which emphasizes the haecitas or "thisness"
of entities marks the origins of Early Modern historical consciousness.
But this new sense of uniqueness was not paired with a systematic
idea of historical development. Indeed, Schiffman argues, the
dominant notion of historical change remained that of Aristotelian
unfolding, and historical methodology remained analytical and
classificatory.
Assuming that changes in social
attitudes about language influence poetic representation, M. Lindsay
Kaplan's "Ars Infamia: The Poetics of Defamation in Early
Modern England" connects shift from indifference to anxiety
in the Early Modern English law of defamation with varying depictions
of slander from Chaucer's House of Fame to Spenser's Faerie
Queen.
Timothy J. Reiss, in "Meaning
in Sixteenth-Century Grammar and Rhetoric: Fabri, Tory, Palsgrave,"
argues that an essential element of modernity appeared in the
solutions of eclectic humanist heirs of scholasticism when they
faced the "problem of an infinite regress of language and
non-linguistic phenomena, even while expressing notions and kinds
of mastery in which an ordered vernacular would have a civic part
of central importance."
EMF 3 will extend the scope of
discussion to the seventeenth century in philosophy, scientific
thought, and literary theory. (DLR)
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